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killing time with beauty

Archives de Tag: Marianne Gugg

Gertrud Arndt was born Gertrud Hanschk in Ratibor (now Racibórz) in 1903. As early as 1918, she expressed a wish to become an architect – an unusual career choice for women at that time – and in 1919 she joined the office of the architect Karl Meinhardt in Erfurt. During her apprenticeship thereshe took her first architectural photos and taught herself darkroom technique. A scholarship grantenabled her to study at the Bauhaus starting in 1923. Paul Klee’s teaching in particular had a continuing influence on her later work. However, at that time it was not yet possible to study architecture atthe Bauhaus. Instead, she moved to the weaving workshop in the spring of 1924, where she completedher training with a final apprenticeship examination in 1927. During this period she designednumerous textile patterns and at least four carpets, including the famous carpet that lay in Gropius’s office starting in 1924, as well as a carpet for the shipowner Eberhard Thost (1927), which can be seen at the exhibition. It is not known whether Gertrud Arndt also took photographs while she was at the Bauhaus in Weimar. She was only able to purchase her first camera in 1926, and she stopped weaving after completing her apprenticeship examination in 1927. Her main focus of interest in photography was taking self‐portraits; she only photographed other motifs to a limited extent. While still studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau, she started to take a series of self‐portraits with widely varying portrait types, clothing, hairstyles and facial expressions. In November 1927, she married Bauhaus member Alfred Arndt and moved with him to Probstzella. She returned to Dessau in 1929 with her
husband, who had in the meantime been appointed a Master at the Bauhaus, and continued with her photographic experiments until shortly after the birth of their daughter Alexandra in 1931. She produced a series of photos with her friend, the weaver Otti Berger, whose dressing‐up is easily recognizable for the viewer. In parallel, Arndt took some 40 shots in which she herself was the central figure. She presented herself apparently in roles, but these are often hard to define, because the arrangement and details of the costume, as well as the gestures and facial expressions, do not match up on closer examination. What the person shown is intended to represent is revealed just as little as the role played by the photographer. Following the closure of the Bauhaus in Dessau, the Arndt family returned to Probstzella in 1933. Following the move, Gertrud Arndt also completely ceased her intensive photographic work and did not resume it even after moving to Darmstadt in 1948. Her photographs were first exhibited at Museum Folkwang in 1979 and brought her international renown.
Her textile designs are today among the most frequently reproduced Bauhaus textiles, and her bestknown carpet, made for the Director’s office, has also been re‐created. Gertrud Arndt died in 2000.

‘Gertrud Arndt’s brief artistic oeuvre – like her career – is marked by fractures and gaps, and this is what makes it particularly attractive. Although she originally wanted to become an architect, she designed magnificent textiles during her training in the Bauhaus weaving workshop. Although she was only active as a photographer for a few years after that, she created her fascinating mask photos, which obstinately evade clear interpretation and thus generate an extraordinary degree of interest,’ says Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi regarding the special exhibition.

The photographic work of Arndt was relatively unknown until she first exhibited her self-portraits in 1979 at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. Although her photographic period lasted less than five years, Arndt ended up taking portraits, photographing herself and her friends in a range of costumes, hairstyles, facial expressions and stage settings. Creating various atmospheres in these works, ranging from severe to absurd to playful, these photographs were to become herMasked Portraitsand are considered by art critics to be the predecessors to the works of Cindy Sherman.Angela Connor